Filed Under:Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph

This afternoon Stereogum premiered the new, animated video for Frog Eyes’ “The Sensitive Girls” by London-based, Russian artist Marsha Balaeva. For Balaeva, “what attracted [her] most was the theme of urban gloom and despair, where everything you look at is palpably wrong and menacing, yet fascinating in some way.”

The animation itself is fully hand-drawn and is made from just under a thousand drawings in ink and pencils. This was the first animation project Balaeva has done in color. At the beginning of the collaboration, Carey Mercer outlined his vision of this song, a mixture of “street despair”, faux-religious imagery, and the dream of fleeing dark places. This loose outline gave her the main theme for the storyline. He also came up with the finishing sequence, when the bird is flying out into the light of a crystal pyramid.

The majority of the city backdrops are based on actual streets and buildings of Liverpool, Manchester and London. A lot of the characters and objects can be traced back to various religious cults and practices, like the dog with the pins. In Kongo, wooden figurines of dogs and men were used by ‘baganga’ (healers) to perform rituals, and if themagic was successful a nail was added to it, so the most powerful objects were studded with nails.

For more information on Marsha Balaeva’s artwork, please visit visit her site here.

One of our favorite Canadian music channels, AUX.TV, recorded a great in-depth interview with Carey Mercer in which he discusses music, poetics, and where Frog Eyes fits in the artistic spectrum. The second video features an incredibly moving, acoustic version of “Violent Psalms.” Both videos are part of AUX.TV’s interview and performance series “What You See Is What You Get,” and you can see those and more here.

From now through the month of June, the Pride of Victoria, British Columbia — Frog Eyes — will be airing the well-read, raw psychedelia found on the band’s Dead Oceans debut, Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph, across this fine continent of ours. As anyone who has crossed paths with this musical beastie knows, Frog Eyes’ shows are primal, otherworldly and maybe as close to a pop music enema as many of us will ever get.

It’s fitting, then, that just as Frog Eyes hits the highway for tour that Carey Mercer take a moment to wax poetic on the city that the band calls home. His brilliant, heartfelt essay on Victoria, British Columbia for Aquarium Drunkard’s Off the Record series is something to behold. Mercer gives us the good, the bad and the ugly of Victoria, calling it a “city for the belly”:

My city is not a city for the mind, and not even a city for the body, but in fact it is a city for the belly.

Think of Falstaff: his coarse gut-tunic is stained with mussel juice and pernod, and he is crocked and delirious on some coriander-ed wheat ale, brewed just minutes from where he now holds court. His mouth spews local-lamb gristle and roasted turnip, and his sleeve is encrusted with the many translucent shells of spot prawn. And then he spies and smells a fresh platter of Chanterelles swimming in butter and duck fat. His tongue curls around his salted and greased cheeks: he is so laminated in oils and pates and jellies that he could easily eat himself. Blackberries stain his chin. Salmon bones hang like forgotten combs in his curled hair. He cannot possibly eat enough.

Wow, right? With that kind of high-lit writing prowess, many have wondered if a side career in letters is something Mercer has considered. But as Mercer told the Portland Mercury recently in a feature to preview Frog Eyes’ upcoming visit, his true place in this world — thank the rawk gawds — is on stage with mighty axe in hand:
Frog Eyes remains unique in Mercer’s ability to fit so many ideas—both lyrical and music—into his songs, which despite their strangeness are actually quite warm and welcoming. “I could become, like, a noise guy who gets paid to go play artist-run centers,” says Mercer of the alternatives to indie rock. “Maybe I could read a poem. But that doesn’t seem as appealing to me as playing in front of 30 awkward teenagers in Boise, Idaho.”

As any fans or casual followers of Vancouver’s media personality Nardwuar the Human Serviette can tell you, his interviews are nothing if not thick with awkwardness. From Jay Z to Julian Casablancas, Nardwuar’s very peculiar style of interviewing has perplexed, annoyed and intrigued. But none so far have been so calm as Frog Eyes’ Carey Mercer who joined Nardwuar via phone last week for a live-on-the-radio interview.

Carey’s Nardwuar interview is almost a meta-interview, cleverly toying with the banality of most interviews and dancing around any real discussion of Frog Eyes’ most excellent new longplayer Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph, which is now on shelves for your musical consumption. And throughout, Carey is inspiring in his patience and thoughtful replies.

That said, the whole interview can be quite delightful. We get lovely nuggets of information about British Columbia’s indie-rock history of which only musicians of that region may be aware. Also, at the tail end, we get to hear Carey and Nardwuar duet for the “Shave and Hair Cut” melody. Perfectly strange ending to a stranger interview.

“Shattered fragments of classic psychedelia and the bits of Springsteen riffs that their countrymen Arcade Fire left behind. 3.5/5 Stars.” – SPIN

“‘ [Songs] ‘Violent Psalms’ and ‘Paul’s Tomb’ pair up in one of Frog Eyes’ most exciting and distinct moments yet: a final act that goes from creepy-solemn to a desperate, heaving crash.” – A.V. CLUB

Also, in celebration of release day, Largehearted Boy posted a new Note Books entry featuring Frog Eyes’ Carey Mercer, where Mercer talks about the books he read during the creation of Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph. “I am not really interested in ideas or authors or novels in themselves; what I am interested in is the cables of similarities that stretch between poles,” he writes. “Thus, all of our expression might be seen as a glittering bridge, stretching between that which we experience and that which we wish to remember—the life of the body, the ‘lived life,’ bridging into the life of the mind. This bridge is the one true wonder of the world.” Read the full entry HERE.

Finally, in other Carey Mercer literary news, read a poem he shared on Said the Gramophone HERE. He also shares a couple of his favorite tunes.

Three years in the making, Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph marks FROG EYES’ thunderous, frantic, fiery return. This is a slow-brewed masterpiece that is unmistakably Frog Eyes, a new album that was very much worth the wait. On this point we feel unassailable: Frog Eyes keeps getting better and better.

Starting today you can pre-order Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph and receive and instant download of the album to enjoy while you wait for the CD or LP to arrive at your door. Pre-order Paul’s Tomb: A TriumphHERE.